I teach at Lehigh University in eastern Pennsylvania. I work on British colonialism, modernism, postcolonial/global literature, and the digital humanities.

Friday, March 10, 2006

I'm Dajjled by the Zournalism at the Times of India

I know, it's an easy and familiar target, but I was tickled by this slip in today's TOI Kanpur:

Is the Indian film industry ready for awards for the best among the worst performances on the lines of Hollywood's Reggie Awards?

For all of you who think that Bollywood is far too 'inspired' by Hollywood, there are still some things from the wild, wild West that clearly do not inspire the folks from India's filmi duniya.

Which is probably why the idea of an awards ceremony to acknowledge the worst performances in filmdom, on the lines of the Reggie Awards in Hollywood, hasn't found favour with the celeb brigade.

While Hollywood takes a tongue-in-cheek look at the best among the worst performances in films, actress Koena Mitra thinks the concept is "disgusting"!

It's always striking when they don't even bother to check a half-remembered name. I know, no one is perfect on this score (I myself am prone to misspell the word "Telugu" quite often). But the Times of India is India's biggest English-language daily!

8 comments:

If you are a reporter of the number one newspaper of India, it is insignificant whether it is Raspberry, Razzies or Reggie. While vested with a grander responsibility of educating a fortunate lot of over one billion, do you have time to rifle through all these nugatory stuffs? No. You don't. You should not.

@Amardeep, our motto is to produce more and produce rubbish. We don't grow up learning the values of professionalism, dutifulness and the likes. Therefore, for our well being, we should very fast make ourselves immune to the embarrassments caused by these unforgivable follies and be able to make up excuses to defend that. Such attitudes are what I call third world attitudes.

@Sunil: The expectation of good English seems a luxury at this moment, but a demand for correct reference to Raspberry award instead of Reggie is not that much.

That reminds me of a physics teacher of ours in high school who would keep referring to something called 'Jhaaai'. It turned out that he was referring to the Greek letter 'Xi'. "Mew", "New", "Jhaaai", "Omicron", "Paaaai".

The Times Of India is a horrible newspaper. It may have been a source of news once, but these days its got nothing but stories about celebrities. I haven't picked it up in five years, but I know it was worse than when I left it.

The other pile of rubbish is that rag which calls itself "India Today." That too I left reading about five years ago. One issue, in particular left me feeling sick. The cover story was about India's coke menace. No, not the sweetened water kind, which might have made sense, but the powdery kind. More sensationalism you couldn't hope to find anywhere. Twenty cokeheads or so reported trying to treat their addictions at some Delhi clinic and that was seen as proof of a major epidemic. Oh, yes, there was a photograph of someone taking a hit using a hundred rupee note. That was the proof, I suppose; the photograph that spoke the thousand words that the writers couldn't convey.

A bunch of rich kids want to spend their money on coke, and that's a big story? If India Today ever wanted to do a story on a looming drug menace, I'd suggest they look at heroin, a much more readily available drug. But then, smack's mostly used by the dregs, those who don't have BMW 7 series to drive around in. I sent the magazine letter asking them to change their name to Gossip Today, but they didn't print it.

It was as if the magazine was proud that India finally had its own coke-sniffing elite. I mean, if you want to discourage a particular activity, the thing to do is not to make it seem as if its cool, and by putting it on the cover of India Today, thought of as the 'cool' newsmagazine (then), you're only helping to perpetuate such behavior. In the U.S, Time magazine does that sort of thing a lot, and no wonder its thought of as lowbrow and without seriousness.

Links, Selected Posts

Amardeep Singh, Associate Professor of English at Lehigh UniversityOn Twitter

My book, Diaspora Vérité: The Films of Mira Nair, published by the University Press of Mississippi in 2018, is now available on Amazon.

I have been working on several digital projects in Scalar. All are in progress as of January 2019.
One is digital archive I am calling "The Kiplings and India." Working with a team of graduate research assistants, we have been building the site in Scalar here. Feedback welcome; it's a work in progress.

I have also been working on a Digital Collection called "Claude McKay's Early Poetry (1912-1922)" This project began as a collaborative class project called "Harlem Echoes," a digital edition of Claude McKay's "Harlem Shadows." The new version of the project is much-expanded, including McKay's early Jamaican poetry as well as his uncollected political poetry from magazines like The Liberator and Workers Dreadnought.

I also put together a digital edition of Jean Toomer's Cane, taking advantage of the fact that that work is now in the public domain. That project can be found here.